Site Lists Links 'Forgotten' by Google (But Not by the Internet)

Breaking News Emails

Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

July 15, 2014 / 9:02 PM GMT / Updated July 15, 2014 / 7:56 PM GMT

The European Union's "Right to be Forgotten" law allows people to request certain links be omitted from Google searches for their name or company. But just because pages don't show up on the German or Spanish Google doesn't mean they're gone entirely — as this website listing censored links proves. "Hidden From Google" has links to a handful of articles, many of which name the perpetrators of criminal or embarrassing acts, and all of which are removed from the Google search results in at least one E.U. country.

Right now the list is short and sourced to articles mentioning the removals, but it still illustrates the point that attempting to prevent something from being seen on the Internet is likely only to call attention to it — the so-called "Streisand Effect." These people may have perfectly good reasons to request the links be removed, but the methods provided to do so are quite limited. Microsoft's Bing is also planning on complying with such requests, but other search engines, like the independent and anonymous DuckDuckGo, may not.